Adrian Newey’s high-rake Aston Martin could benefit from F1’s planned 2027 rule changes

As you read this the first update of the so-far disastrously slow Aston Martin–Honda AMR26 will have appeared for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Until this point the car had received no performance upgrades all year and as such it forms a useful baseline for measuring the progress of everyone else.

Although the competitive order at the front of the F1 field has not radically changed through the season to date, that undersells just how much progress the top teams have made since the opening round in Melbourne. The current Ferrari and Red Bull, for example, are around 1.5sec faster than their equivalent Melbourne models. The Mercedes and McLaren are around 0.7sec faster. These are just order of magnitude measurements made by comparing their advantage over the one car – the Aston Martin – which has had no performance upgrades.

As this is the first season of this regulation set, the rate of development has been high as new knowledge is quickly gained – even within the constraints of a cost cap. Typically, as the regulations remain stable we tend to see a convergence of performance. However, regulation tweaks planned for next season may well delay that process because one of the tweaks in particular – moving back the leading edge of the underbody plank by 300mm – could have the unintended consequence of requiring a rethink on the aerodynamic philosophies of the cars. This might just be a welcome present for Adrian Newey as he and his team develop the Aston.

Abandoning the ground-effect tunnels of 2022-25 and returning to flat-bottomed cars for this year has made it advantageous once more to run the floor at an angle, pointing downwards at the front (i.e. rake). In this way the whole floor forms a venturi, with a small opening at the front expanding into a larger volume of space rearwards. That change in volume lowers the air pressure there, which induces the air to flow faster, thereby increasing downforce. The limitation on how low the front of the floor can be is the underbody plank.

But that’s just the very basics of it. There are further limitations in how far you can go with the rake angle – at the rear. The more you can out-wash the air disturbed by the front tyres away from the car, the more advantage you can derive from increasing the rear ride height. But there is a part of the 2026 regulations which is specifically trying to limit how much out-wash can be achieved – the requirement of ‘floor boards’ at the outer edges of the front of floor (between the front wheels and sidepods). These try to in-wash the air so as to keep the wake of the car from being too disruptive to the car behind. Hence we do not yet see the sort of rake angles which were commonplace at the end of the last flat-bottom regulations in 2021.

Almost every development seen on the cars this year has been to limit that in-wash of the dirty air and speed up the nice energised flow along the sides of the floor to the rear corner ahead of the back tyre – and divert it around the diffuser with as much energy as possible. This induces the diffuser to work harder, which in turn increases the feasible rake angle, keeping the diffuser airflow attached even at low speeds (when the rear of the car is at its highest and the speed of airflow at its lowest).

“The rate of development has been high as knowledge is quickly gained”

Ferrari has made two major upgrades this year (at Miami and Barcelona) and their combined effect (as measured in qualifying against the undeveloped Aston Martin) has been a 1.8% improvement. Red Bull made the same improvement from its Miami/Austria two-part upgrade. Mercedes and McLaren, with one major upgrade each (at Montreal and Miami respectively) have found around 0.8%. Translated to the average pole position time to date, 1.8% represents around 1.5sec, 0.8% is 0.67sec.

As those four teams have found ever-better ways of limiting the in-wash up front and energising the flow into that rear corner, so they’ve gradually been able to creep up on feasible rake angles. But at Aston, Newey boldly opted for a very high rake angle right from the start and stuck with it. Newey has always been a big fan of high rake and took it further than anyone else in his Red Bull days. But the non-development of the initial AMR26 (the team preferring to focus on the big B-spec update for Budapest) has meant that it’s not had the supporting airflow qualities to fully exploit the potential of such a rake angle. Newey’s determination to stick with that way of running the car suggests he believes he can eventually feed that angle. He clearly does not want to follow a different development route, preferring to focus resource onto a concept he believes has more potential.

Which brings us to the regulation changes for ’27. Because more downforce brings with it more drag and that in turn spreads the electrical energy even more thinly, the FIA is trying to limit the downforce further and is introducing changes to the rear wing and leading edge of the floor. But the motivation of moving back the plank’s leading edge by 300mm is safety, as it’s felt the current layout presents a risk of the plank penetrating the cockpit area of another car in the event of a collision.

But what the reg change also does is allow the front of the car to be run lower before the plank interferes. In other words, it will be possible to increase the rake angle while maintaining the existing rear ride height. It should make the rear more stall-resistant. With a more forceful flow from the smaller opening at the front, the potential of more rake becomes greater and the critical choke points – the surfaces of the car which form the limit in the feeding of that rear corner with airflow – change. It could be that, as Newey has observed, “This will bring a lot of different aero characteristics and gives everyone a very different aero challenge to solve. We think we are much better placed than we would have been a year ago to take advantage of that.”